Friends, let me summon my full videogame-expert authority to tell you: Studios don't like it when you pirate their games. They're not fans! And fair enough, really. If I found out that someone was filtering all my articles into Athletic Dame Repacks that you had to read off of torrented .iso files, I'd be… mystified, primarily—this is a free website—but also a bit miffed.
That sets me apart from the good folks at Safety Stoat Studios, a small studio that specialises in "innovative games that run on outdated hardware," meaning Sega Mega Drive/Genesis games released (on Itch.io) in our big year of 2024. Generally, the expectation is that curious players will check them out on emulators, but Safety Stoat recently became aware of at least one entrepreneur who had taken one of its games, packaged it up in seemingly era-appropriate Japanese Sega packaging, and began flogging it for $120 on eBay.
